2012-11-26

Arduino LCD: Defuse

This games is about finding a bomb in a 100 x 100 x 100 cube. That's 1 million possibilities. To help out the player is given a mysterious bomb detector. There is 200 seconds (20 turns) to find the bomb. Each turn the player gives coordinates and the scanner returns a new reading.

This time I made some quite big changes to the game. I cut some of the flavour text for illegal moves. For example, if you input numbers too large or small then you'd accidentally step outside the building and fall to your death. Also, the original game uses a fixed algorithm for building the scanner reading. Once you know this algorithm them you can theoretically win in one turn. Instead I made the scanner algorithm change every game. This gives much more replay than the original. It is still very easy to win though and 20 turns is perhaps too many. In my first attempt I won in 8 turns and that included making many errors and inefficient plays.

HINT1: The scanner does not give a pythagorean distance, but it is a strength reading.

HINT2: Get each digit of the scanner to a 9

SPOILER: Each scanner digit is the nine minus the difference between the bomb's position and the scanned position for that digit. The order of the digits is intentionally mixed up. Work digit by digit. Go with "9 minus the most common digit" as your first guess. Once you've located the coordinate digit on the scanner then you can test for value at the same time you locate the next coordinate digit.